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Arbiter of Style and Grammar Goes Online

There are those who say that in the Internet age the rules of grammar and style are dead. But the people at the University of Chicago Press, publisher of the Chicago Manual of Style, are not among them.

And so starting tomorrow the manual — sometimes known as publishing’s Miss Manners — will be available online by subscription, meaning that those who need to know, pronto, whether it is ever all right to capitalize the first letters of e. e. cummings’s name will no longer have to search through the more than 956-page volume to find the answer.

The price for the online manual will be $25 for individuals for the first year, $30 thereafter, and more for institutions, depending on their size. The list price of the hardcover print version is $55.

And if you listen to Anita Samen, managing editor of the press’s books division, having the manual online is going to revolutionize the way its users, who include writers, editors and publishers, work. “You can consult it on the fly,” she said, “so you are free to do your writing and editing without having to retain huge numbers of rules in your head.”

The press will continue to maintain its free question-and-answer Web page, informally known as Car Talk for Writers, and it will be incorporated into the new online manual too. Ms. Samen said the press might add other features to the online manual, including a chat group.

Photo

Anita Samen of the University of Chicago Press, with many manuals.Credit
Sally Ryan for The New York Times

Since the first edition, the “Manual of Style: Being a compilation of the typographical rules in force at the University of Chicago Press, to which are appended specimens of type in use,” published in 1906, the manual has been a steady seller. The most recent edition, the 15th, published in 2003, has already sold more than 200,000 copies.

Carol Kasper, director of marketing for the press’s book division, said, “Every year more and more books are published worldwide.” Or as her colleague Ellen Gibson, the press’s marketing manager for reference and retail books, put it, “Everyone is a writer these days.”

And of course every writer’s creation requires an editor, and a style book. “People use it obsessively,” Ms. Kasper said, “they’re really geeky about it.”

Other reference books have been online for years, but the University of Chicago Press wanted to wait until the revised 15th edition, several years in the making, “to see the reactions,” Ms. Samen said. “We wanted to research very carefully what features and functionality our readers wanted.”

Ms. Kasper says the online edition won’t cannibalize sales of the printed manual. In the press’s market research, she said, 30 to 40 percent of users said they would use both, “because they still like the feel of” the book, “and like to look at it.”

As to that Cummings question, according to paragraph 8.6 of the manual, it is fine to capitalize his name, in part because “one of his publishers, not he himself, lowercased his name.” (The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage also calls for the capitalization.) But the Chicago Manual says it is not all right to capitalize the name of the writer bell hooks because she insists that it be lower case.

“This makes life difficult, however, for those of us who cannot bear to begin a sentence with a lowercase letter,” the manual says. “We advise you to rewrite.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page E3 of the New York edition with the headline: Tough Arbiter On the Web Has Guidance For Writers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe